I am pleased to post the second episode in our continuing series of product vignettes — short video recordings of important features in ActiveVOS.

This time, Mike Moniz demonstrates how to use ActiveVOS to customize the work list manager (he calls it an “inbox”) that users access in order to process tasks assigned to them by the ActiveVOS BPM system.

Make no mistake: what you are looking at is a fully compliant BPEL4People and the WS-Human Task client which can be easily modified to meet your UI requirements. By leveraging the inter-related BPEL4People and WS-HT standards, ActiveVOS is able to deftly include human activities in complex automated workflows.

Frequent readers of our blog know that there’s a healthy debate (here and here) going on about whether or not BPEL is appropriate for SOA-based BPM. (BPMN is often proposed as the “alternative.”) We think that debate misses the point: computers require precise definition of all the runtime details to run applications. Ergo, an execution-oriented language like BPEL is required.

We think the real question boils down to: does BPEL have what it takes to both run “on the metal” and permit the inclusion of human tasks into running processes? When you see what you can do with BPEL4People and WS-Human Task in ActiveVOS 6, the answer is clearly, “Yes.”